IN-TUNE

There are times when it might work to place your drums in a different acoustic space from the rest of the instruments; sometimes this can sound disconcerting, and sometimes this can be a stroke of brilliance. Try running a very large reverb on the drums—maybe a large concert hall with a short attack and no predelay. Bring it back on a separate aux track, then move the drums back and forth in space by simply changing the wet/dry relationship until you can get the perfect blend between the two.

Change the reverb to a chorus or a flange and see what the blend of the two tracks does for your mix. You can achieve a very industrial tone in this manner.

Other ideas: Distort the drums, run them through a guitar amplifier, over-compress them, limit them to the point of distortion, and then beat them up with a compressor! (We're talking 5:1 at –15dB after distortion—go big!) Drums can be dirty, nasty, busy, anything they need to be, as long as you retain the groove.